A variety of vending machines, including bulk vending machines, are known and used. Vending machines normally give a customer the opportunity to select from a variety of items such as chips, candy, pretzels, gum, soda and the like. Bulk vending machines, however, normally hold large quantities of a particular product and do not give a customer a choice between goods (i.e., vend only a single product). Both machine types typically include means for coin operation.
Bulk vending machines are used for the automatic dispensing of a wide variety of products, such as gum balls, nuts and candy. These vending machines come in different shapes and sizes, and are typically fitted with a clear glass or plastic compartment which retains the bulk product to be vended. The typical bulk vending machine also has a coin acceptor and actuating mechanism for the receipt of payment and initiating discharge of product. Plural bulk vending machines are often cited together in a single location, and may even be provided from the manufacturer in a multi-machine access/display assembly.
In operation, the customer places a coin or coins into the coin mechanism of the bulk vending machine and turns a handle (or knob) on the machine, whereby one or a handful of product (depending upon product) in the machine are dispensed down a chute for receipt by the customer. Received coins are stored in a storage compartment where the coins remain until retrieved by an operator.
Bulk vending machines transact one sale at a time at a set price. An owner/operator of the machine is required periodically to maintain and restock the machine and collect the money therefrom, typically manually recording collections from and product resupplied to each machine to thereby maintain a record of sales performance of each of the individual machines. Furthermore, bulk vending machines tend to be sited in remote locations to provide for the sale of merchandise at all hours, without requiring the presence of a sales person. This means that they are often subject to vandalism and/or tampering by users.
The process of monitoring inventory, and calculating, tracking and recording the total revenues for each machine in each location is tedious, time-consuming, subject to both human error and fraud, and has heretofore provided substantially less than a perfectly accurate measure of sales performance. Since many establishments where a bulk vending machine or machines are sited receive a percentage of the revenues collected from each machine, accuracy of the sales performance and documentation of sales is important to an owner/operator of the bulk vending machines sited thereat. Moreover, since owner/operators often utilize independent route personnel for maintenance and collections in a given territory, and/or since other times coll ctions are overseen by managers of the business hosting the sited machine or machines, having independent verification and/or documentation that is secure from manipulation would be advantageous for the owner/operator.
As a partial solution to the foregoing, some vending machines can be purchased or otherwise equipped with a counter to count vending transactions. Where thus equipped, the owner/operator can compare the accumulated count from the counter with receipts collected by contractors, employees or site-based management from time to time (i.e., by going to the machine and independently auditing the count reported on the counter) to ascertain the accuracy of fund collection and reporting. Heretofore known counters for bulk vending machines are easily temporarily disconnected, however, and have been subject to inaccuracy caused by machine user tampering and/or vandalism.
Devices have been heretofore suggested and/or utilized to detect and/or minimize user tampering and/or fraud associated with vending machine sales (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,741,426, 5,339,937, and 4,976,346, for example). Moreover, devices and systems for monitoring sales activity and inventory of vending machines have also been heretofore suggested and/or utilized (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,091,713, 5,930,771, 5,267,171, and 5,963,452, for example). Many such heretofore known systems, however, are not well adapted for use with bulk vending machines, have been directed to addressing only one aspect of the problem (merely detecting use of improper coinage in vending machines, record keeping, remote monitoring, or disconnection of counters for example), and/or are unduly expensive and complex.
One heretofore suggested device (see U.S. Pat. No. 6,050,385) provides a bulk vending machine coin mechanism together with a counter. The mechanism/counter combination is designed to be received into a standard coin mechanism receiving structure in the bulk vending machine. The counter includes a numeric display and a contact switch assembly wherein first and second spaced apart wires are contactable by a conductive element rotatable with the coin mechanism at different locations along the arc of rotation of the coin mechanism during a vending operation. The first wire pair is connected with the display and the second wire pair is connected with a capacitor thereby to count an occurrence of vending and disenable another count until after a charge/discharge cycle of the capacitor. In this way, double counts during a single vending operation are typically avoided.
However, such heretofore known coin mechanism/counter combination records a vend occurrence at the initial rotation of the coin mechanism when the coin is first inserted. No validation vend sequence is provided. Furthermore, the capacitor can be charged by means other than by the wire pair contacts alone. In addition, the duration for which the wire pairs are in connection, and the condition of the wire pair contacts, can effect charging of the capacitor to different degrees. Thus, by “jiggling” the dispensing knob of the machine, contact between wire pair contacts can occur more than once in a given vend cycle thereby causing the counter to be able to erroneously record multiple vends. If the conductive element is moved too quickly by the capacitor discharge wire pair, thus minimizing contact therebetween, the capacitor may remain partially charged. In such case, when cycled to the next vend, a failure to record the subsequent vend may occur since a charge/discharge cycle may not occur. Further improvement is thus justified.